The good news is that changing one’s behaviour can have great impact on our sense of well-being and general health, so says Warwick’s Professor Gordon Brown whose work is at the interface of economics and cognitive psychology.
Professor Brown, along with Neil Stewart and Alex Wood argue in The New Optimists that the focus will shift from mastery of the environment to mastery of our cognition. Money typically explains only 1-2% of individual differences in happiness. Thus improving national happiness may well be better achieved by a greater emphasis on preventing unemployment rather than increasing everyone’s income.
Professor Brown’s research interests in the computational and mathematical modelling of human timing and memory; categorisation, identification, and word recognition; and the interface between economic psychology, cognitive science, and psychophysics
Tags: cognition, cognitive science, economic psychology, economics, Gordon Brown, human happiness, Warwick University